Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday June 21, 2017 @07:25PM
from the speeding-bullet dept.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) has partnered with the South Korean government and local universities to build the world's first full-scale Hyperloop system. "The agreement was actually signed back in January but only revealed this week, and sees HTT team up with the South Korean government's department of technological innovation and infrastructure, along with the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building (KICT) and Hanyang University," reports New Atlas. From the report: It involves the construction of a full-scale testbed, licensing of HTT's vacuum tube, levitation, propulsion and battery technologies along with the co-development of safety standards and regulations. The agreement is a multi-year partnership intended to build a new transportation system for South Korea, one which will be known as the HyperTube Express and carry passengers between Seoul and Busan in under 20 minutes, compared to the current three-hour drive. HTT may be setting out to build the world's first Hyperloop but it is no guarantee, with fellow startups Arrivo and Hyperloop One also moving full-steam ahead with their plans. The latter in particular seems to be making solid progress, recently showing off a full-scale test track in Nevada and forming agreements with Russia, Finland and Dubai to explore the feasibility of a Hyperloop in those countries. It's too early to tell who will be first out of the gate, but the competition is certainly heating up.

Transistorizing it would be way too dangerous. It is built for Sout Korea, and if you put inside transistors, somebody else (guess who...) will add a Li-Ion battery and the whole thing will catch fire.

I once traveled Amtrak from Seattle to Atlanta. It took a little over 5.5 days. The ticket was $2,300 since I wanted a place to sleep since sitting in chair would have just been hell for most of a week. Even if Amtrak could do 300 MPH between stops, it still would have taken three entire days (yes, I did the math since I had nothing but time during my trip) including the long layovers to change trains so that is still pretty crappy.

A huge amount of freight in Europe goes via sea and rail too. In fact there are many large distribution centres that are supplied by rail. A lot is then transferred to road because that ends up being more efficient currently than sending one container load down a branch line, and. commuters don't want mixed trains and delays to have freight containers removed. If it was possible to unload during a station stop (two or three minutes) without much investment you might see even more rail transport.

commuters don't want mixed trains and delays to have freight containers removed. If it was possible to unload during a station stop (two or three minutes) without much investment you might see even more rail transport.

You obviously have never heard of sidings (is that an understood terminiology in the US? UK term for a bit of track alongside the main track for parking trains for unloading freight etc). Most stations in the UK used to have freight sidings; but most of those have been removed as "inefficient".and converted into car parks or housing.

My point is that the US rail system is huge (the largest in the world by far), it is highly utilized, and very efficient. Making the US system more like the European system by burdening it with passenger traffic and adding high speed trains would make it less efficient and increase emissions.

And if Europeans wanted a more efficient rail system, they should follow the US model, rather than the other way around.

My point is that the US rail system is huge (the largest in the world by far), it is highly utilized, and very efficient. Making the US system more like the European system by burdening it with passenger traffic and adding high speed trains would make it less efficient and increase emissions.

Emissions mean you're burning fuel. Fuel costs money. American corporations don't like to spend money and are constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing business and squeezing out costs.

So, yeah - the US is very worried about emissions, just not for the reasons everyone else is.

(For reference [uic.org], the EU freight rail share is 11.9% while the US freight rail share is 32.6%. The EU is much better about electrification of rail - it's basically non-existent in the US except for some passenger rail.)

Background discussion: "The US should use more rail / should be more like Europe."

Me: "The US has the biggest and most efficient rail system on the planet; you simply don't notice it because it's all freight. European rail systems are less efficient because they use part of their system for passenger transport."

You: "European industry likes inefficient modes of transport!"

Wow, great argument you have there!

In addition, it is the mix of passenger and rail traffic that is causing frequent freight delays in Eu

Europe wastes much of its rail network on moving people around while burdening the roads with freight traffic

You really have no idea do you. The network by the way is a "Eurasia" network. You're more than welcome to drop a cargo ship off in the port of Rotterdam and rail it all the way to Guangzhou China if you want. The few freight trucks that are actually on the roads are not at all a burden.

The few freight trucks that are actually on [Euopean] roads are not at all a burden.

You obviously never drive in the UK. On motorways the trucks are often filling two of the three lanes in nose-to-tail groups of 20 or more, with cars queuing behind to pass in the outer lane. The trucks are often stuck together aerodynamically. We call these situations "elephant races". Then you will see high streets in towns blocked for minutes by massive trucks delivering penny parcels to shops or fighting to pass each other in opposite directions.

Looks like it. A real shame. And all your people had to do is not to listen to the completely disconnected-from-reality UK "elite". Also I am well aware that a _lot_ of people voted against this suicide-move, and they do not deserve what is to come at all.

No I drive in Europe. Not only in Europe but regularly only the main highways between the two largest ports and trading hubs of Europe.

On motorways the trucks are often filling two of the three lanes in nose-to-tail groups of 20 or more

In many parts of Europe trucks are not allowed to overtake during the day if there's only 2 lanes on the motorway. In the parts where you are it's rarely an issue that holds up people for more than a few seconds.

Then you will see high streets in towns blocked for minutes by massive trucks delivering penny parcels to shops or fighting to pass each other in opposite directions.

I'm sure solving this middle of the town delivery issue is best done by putting a freight train down the main street. Don't conflate the last mile problem with international freight.

And all of this doesn't change the fact that by far the most cargo in Europe is carried by electric rail.

And all of this doesn't change the fact that by far the most cargo in Europe is carried by electric rail.

In fact, most freight is carried by roads, in both the US and in Europe, as you can easily look up on the US DOT and EU sites ("modal split"). So, please stop making things up.

Anyway, what we're talking about here is which rail system utilizes its resources better, and that's the US system. In addition, the US rail system is by far the largest in the world. If Europe wants a more efficient rail system, i

Anyway, what we're talking about here is which rail system utilizes its resources better, and that's the US system.

That's a red herring. The real question is, which country is really utilizing rail as much as it should be, and the answer is... Japan? Maybe? Certainly nowhere in Europe, and certainly not the USA. We should have a lot more rail.

I'm not making anything up. I just don't feel burdened in the slightest. I am more burdened by the fact my coffee machine is in the kitchen not right next to my chair than I am by trucks on the main highways.

Anyway, what we're talking about here is which rail system utilizes its resources better, and that's the US system.

Actually what we're talking about here is if the goalposts should be further to the left or to the right. Let me remind you what I quoted you as saying: "Europe wastes much of its rail network on moving people around while burdening the roads with freight traffic". The absolute magnitude or usage or rai

I'm sure solving this middle of the town delivery issue is best done by putting a freight train down the main street. Don't conflate the last mile problem with international freight.

No. it would be solved by single rail freight depots serving a whole town or district and distributing and collecting goods by small-to-midsized road trucks, or optionally holding goods for collection. Not much different from what courier companies do in the UK now, except their depots generally take delivery by large road trucks, not rail; these couriers make a tidy profit, so don't tell me (like the 1960's railway bean counters did) that it is uneconomic.

Maybe you yourself should check just how burdened the roads of Europe are. Unless the definition of burden is like what I'm experiencing right now, the burden of having to get up out of this chair and get a cup of coffee.

Maybe you yourself should check just how burdened the roads of Europe are.

I don't need to check, I have been driving on European roads for decades. Trucks are a massive problem on European roads and a constant political issue in countries like Germany and Switzerland. If you don't know this, you really are out of touch with European politics.

But that isn't even what we are talking about here. What we are actually talking about is whether Europe's rail system should be a model for the US rail system. You err

Trucks are a massive problem on European roads and a constant political issue in countries like Germany and Switzerland. If you don't know this, you really are out of touch with European politics.

Politics is irrelevant due difference of reality vs people's perception. There's all sorts of "politics" not grounded on any fact. But okay, I'm going to assume you just have some major unlucky roads. I too have been driving European roads for decades, in the Germany you so kindly cite.

Complete and total non-issue.

You erroneously thought that that was related to truck volumes

Actually I replied to a direct quote. What you think is or is not in error should be directed to the person who originally wrote the statement. And while you're at it the original comment said tha

And while you're at it the original comment said that "Europe *wastes* it's rail on people", to prove that you need to show me how the Europe would be better suited to put those people on the road and the trucks on the rail. Common I'll wait*.

Well, that's what we're really talking about: should rail be used for passengers or for freight or for a mix.

Criteria are: cost, emissions, and travel times.

Yes, my contention is that an all-freight rail network like the US network results in substantially better resou

Actually, for inland freight transport [uic.org], the EU has a greater intensity of road transport to rail transport (51.1 / 11.9 = 4.2x) than does the US (56.8 / 32.6 = 1.7x).

Europe ships more by sea than the US (a combination of being surrounded on three sides by ocean and from importing/exporting a greater percentage of its goods overseas) but once it gets on dry land, you use trucks to a much greater degree than does the US.

Europe doesn't waste rail capacity on people. Those passenger trains don't replace freight, they have separate lines for that. Surprisingly, freight tends not to want to go to the same places as people. There are separate lines, or lines used during the day for people and at night for freight.

And no matter how you look at it, a train carrying 200 people and 10 trucks on the road vs. a train carrying 10 containers and 150 cars on the road is a pretty good trade-off.

It's basically how (and when) the rail systems have grown up, partnered and died over time.

Additionally, the northern states have generally been more industrialized, leading to "outsized" growth of rail systems there.

Chicago, when the rail lines were first coalescing, was a natural economic hub into the west and generally right on the demarcation line of what was The United States and the western territories. St. Louis also shares this to a certain extent. Heading south from there, the next major east-west hub would have been Memphis. And while it IS a transport hub, it's still a Johnny-Come-Lately due to the aforementioned dichotomy between industrialization in the north vs the south.

Additionally, for a while, every railroad venture was building on its own gauge of track. By the middle of the 19th century, there had been a major push towards a standard gauge. Current standard gauge (Stephenson gauge, international gauge or normal gauge) is 1435mm (4'8" in the US) distance between the inside of each rail. And it's used in roughly 55% of the world's track systems.

Again, the south, being behind, especially after the US Civil War was still mired in competition between rail lines. So businessmen didn't want their equipment potentially falling into the hands of rivals. So the proliferation of non-standard gauges continued MUCH longer. And because of this, lack of standardization, replacement parts were orders of magnitude more expensive. Because they had to be built on-spec, rather than just being pulled from a standard parts bin. This expense eventually became unmanageable and rail lines in the south started dying off.

What routes existing in the southern US now are either relative new builds or are legacies of rail line builders who settled (or just happen to have built) on/near standard gauge.

Not as comfortable or convenient, though. Shinkansen is a great way to travel. Arrive, buy your ticket, walk straight onto the platform, catch whatever train happens to be next and going in the right direction, take whatever seat (much roomier and more comfortable than airplane seats), then relax and enjoy the ride.

Seattle to Los Angeles should be very doable by train, but it currently takes twice as long as it does by car.Amsterdam to Madrid is a similar distance, but it is fairly easily two hours quicker by train than by car.

Although it has to be said that once you venture into the Balkan area or Scandinavia, things get tricky fairly quickly if you want to travel by train.

The problem is a combination of certain trips being unrealistic by train (even if a train were capable of consistently traveling at 250mph, and were given a straight piece of track, neither of which are practical, it'd take over 20 hours to cross the continental USA) and a lack of investment in rail. Amtrak is always short of funds, it does what it can with what it has, and is at least slowly working on the corridor strategy (the only sane way to do sustainable mid-distance train travel), but it's not exact

Hyperloop itself isn't designed for journeys of that length - it's designed to be optimal for intermediary length trips, with trains better for shorter journeys and aircraft better for longer journeys. That said, it is possible to make Hyperloop have a higher top speed (and thus reduced long-distance travel time) by increasing the sonic velocity of the gas - aka, via either increasing the temperature of the (highly rarified) gas inside the tube, or by using a (rarified) light gas such as hydrogen or helium. The latter requires increased tube evacuation pumping to minimize the fraction of leaked-in-air in the tubes. The former may happen to some extent on its own due to compression heating from passing Hyperloop capsules (the tube itself will be an effective thermal radiator, but the gas inside (due to its very low density) will not be very effective at transferring heat into the tube). Both lighter and hotter gases not only increase the sonic velocity, but also decrease air resistance (particularly using light gases). The low densities mean that you don't use great quantities of gases - meaning that the amounts of helium are affordable and loss rates acceptable, while hydrogen would not be prone to embrittling the tube or presenting a tube explosion hazard even when mixed with leaked-in air (although its behavior inside the capsule compressors / air bearings / etc needs consideration). Rarified water vapour, ammonia or methane atmospheres would also allow improved speeds of sound vs. air, although not to the degree of hydrogen or helium.

Another issue for long-distance travel via Hyperloop is that the faster you go, the greater the minimum bend radius. Not so much of an issue when you're going over flat plains, but once you start getting into uneven terrain it can present problems. "Floating Hyperloop" is particularly appealing for when dealing with very high speed travel due to the ability to sculpt bend radii as gently as you want over open ocean.

The Hyperloop design document doesn't consider that other technology can't or won't advance as well. But for at least intermediate-distance travel, they argue - convincingly, in my opinion - that increased aircraft speed, even if associated with improved economics, can't beat out Hyperloop. This is because of the simple reason that increasing aircraft speed means increasing altitude (to reduce the velocity-squared drag and to avoid sonic boom effects on the surface), which means increased subsonic climbing and descent times. Not a problem for long journeys, but for intermediate hops, that looks like a fairly fundamental barrier.

Don't forget the "airport". Being minimum 1h early to board a plane. Having the airport minimum 1h by car or public transport away.E.g. you fly from Paris to London, I would guess the flight time is less than an hour. But to get to one of the three airports of Paris takes you minimum an hour, with boarding time that is 2h. Now you land outside of London, again more than an hour away from the city center. So bottom line Pars to London is at least a 4h trip by plane.Even the existing Eurostar is already faste

(even if a train were capable of consistently traveling at 250mph, and were given a straight piece of track, neither of which are practical, it'd take over 20 hours to cross the continental USA)

It doesn't [necessarily] matter if it takes over 20 hours if you can sleep, do work, eat a meal that didn't come out of a prepackaged styrofoam tray... Obviously, for some cases it matters, and in those cases people will still want to fly, but we could still be using rail more often. In addition, not all the trips are all the way across the country.

Oh I agree, that said, 20 hours is enough to be uneconomic - for a trip of that length, passengers are going to want better amenities (somewhere to sleep) and fewer would be interested.

This is why corridor services (regular, hourly, services with a total trip of four hours or less) tends to work better as a sustainable (ie self funding) service. You can provide a great deal more comfort than a plane, passengers can work or relax, total trip time is within an order of magnitude (in some cases better than)

I once traveled Amtrak from Seattle to Atlanta.....Even if Amtrak could do 300 MPH between stops, it still would have taken three entire days... including the long layovers to change

And with Hyperloop it would take... what? Your trip time was dominated by changeovers and convoluted routing (as someone else has described), not by the speed of the train. Unless there were a direcr Hyperloop between Seattle and Atlanta (don't hold your breath for it materialising) the Hyperloop experience could be very similar.

That's where hyperloop could save on travel time tremendously: if there actually is a continuous network, you wouldn't have to slow down, stop, and accelerate at each intermediate station like a regular train; you could zoom flat out to your destination. It would also mean that you could presumably build a hyperloop station at every two horse town along the way, no need for those people to travel to a major town, again cutting a lot of travel time. Provided that switching tubes will be possible, and econom

Don't know much about railways do you? European trains do not stop at each intermediate station. There are [at least] two types of train, expresses (or "Inter-City") and stopping (or "Local"). The expresses skip the intermediate stops while the stopping trains do stop at those stations, often on passing loops to allow an express to overtake. On many main lines there are four or even six tracks (ie two or three each way) for the different types of train.

It would also mean that you could presumably build a hyperloop station at every two horse town along the way

Sigh. Regular trains either service small stations meaning that they take ages to travel longer distances, or they only stop at major stations which means that you first have to travel to a major station in order to take advantage of them (adding more time as you change trains)

I know exactly how trains work, I used to work as an engineer for a railway company and have even driven trains. I have also travelled more miles by train than any other form of transport. Thanks though.

Let me draw you a picture:........ Hyperloop: [enter pod at Two Horse Town] --- zooooooooooooooooooooooooom --- [arrive at Shitface Gulch] See how that works?

Great, but only if Hyperloop does go to Two Horse Town and Shitface Gulch (which sounds very unlikely from the names), and you are the only passenger on board. A "pod" on conventional rails could do that too if you laid rails to those places; such "pods" have been tried [greatwestern.org.uk], but operators did not find them e

That's not in the slightest "how they're selling it". Read the design document [spacex.com]. To reiterate that which for some inexplicable reason has to be repeated in every thread about Hyperloop: the Hyperloop Alpha design:

* Is not a pneumatic tube
* Is not a vacuum train
* Would not even work in a hard vacuum
* Is not maglev
* Is a ground-effect aircraft / air-bearing suspended vehicle in a highly rarified atmosphere, utilizing a battery-powered compressor to shunt the air built u

Is this a legitimate technology or the stuff of legend we will talk about when this generation's tech bubble burts?

A Hyperloop will be built, somewhere, but probably only as a novelty ride like to Las Vegas. It will be incredibly expensive, but Musk will pay because he wants his name on a flag. It will close when the novelty wears off and the maintenance gets expensive, joining the long list of other technological white elephants, like airships, Brunel's vacuum propelled trains*, and aircraft with flapping wings.

* Yes, yes, no relationship to the Hyperloop, no more than airships are.

Here's the thing about hyperloops. You maintain a vacuum you need intense, spread-out pressure along a sturdy structure like an arc/circle/triangle/whatever. If you so much as take a good swing at it with a hammer when it's at a near-vacuum, you ruin the shape and it collapses in a massive, loud implosion. Look up "truck vacuum collapse" on youtube if you're not familiar. These aren't just sensitive to terrorist attacks, they're sensitive to a car running into them and killing everyone on the train. Heck a

Right. Because when I want an engineering analysis, I always turn to an organic chemist.

Meanwhile, in the real world, mild or hard vacuum lines and chambers are widely used in industry (for example, see VDUs), and designing a structure to be stable against vacuum, including in catastrophic-rupture scenarios is basic engineering. Believe me, the VDU and its low pressure lines are not what people at refineries fear ruptures in - if you want to see some alarm, rupture a line fo

VDUs are also much higher diameter, which makes them harder to design, not easier. And the feed lines can have very high length to diameter ratios.

It's the same engineering principles. The amount of structural reinforcement - both wall thickness, and reinforcing rings - to resist implosion is very well understood engineering and there are standard guidelines for it. Thunderf00t's ignorant nonsense to the contrary headlined with comic sans text done in what looks like MS Paint notwithstanding.

Say we have one kilometer of tube with 7 ft diameter, so the volume is about 3500 m^3. The crappy vacuum roughing pump I used in a previous lab was 25 m^3/hr with a 1 hp motor, so it would take 23 days to pump to a solid medium vacuum using that one crappy pump that utilizes half a household outlet. That is about 430 kW-hr of electricity, so around $60 per kilometer to pump out. A larger pump would be more efficient, and with off-the-shelf metal seals, there would be no problems with a mechanical pump ke

I checked it out. He thinks it's impossible because...expansion joints and because the atmosfear is too heavy. Right. Sorry but his analysis is bullshit and he nitpicks at lots of things that are irrelevant to the main idea. Like whether powering it with solar panels is viable or what the price of a ticket will be. Who gives a shit? A regular high speed train doesn't need to be solar powered and neither does a hyperloop and if the tickets are expensive so what? It will be a train system for the rich then. I

The expansion joints thing is just another example of why you don't turn to a biochemist for a lecture on engineering. Most HSR doesn't have expansion joints either. Lots of things don't have expansion joints. There are three standard ways in industry to deal with thermal expansion: 1) resist it, 2) let it expand by increased bend radii, 3) let it expand by increased linear length. All three are widely used. In HSR, it's common practice to use the "resist" approach - they generally lay the track hot, so that when it cools it contracts and there's built-in tension on all but the hottest days. They usually use heavy and/or anchored ties (commonly concrete) to resist track movement. Pipelines generally use some combination of #1 (e.g. overburden anchoring), #2 (e.g. expansion loops) or #3 (e.g. slip-type expansion joints). Hyperloop wants to use #3, with the dampers as slip joints (e.g. like teflon shoes on pipelines). Whoop-de-doodle-doo. Even if that sort of thing wasn't already a common solution for thermal expansion, they could always just switch to resisting expansion, with a pretensioned tube, like the rail on HSR.

The expansion joints thing is just another example of why you don't turn to a biochemist for a lecture on engineering. Most HSR doesn't have expansion joints either. Lots of things don't have expansion joints

There is another expansion option that is kind of like an expansion loop and already used on vacuum systems: corrugation. There are a lot of vacuum systems that have parts cycling to cryogenic or high temps (sometimes in different parts of the same machine). Ideally you try to isolate that from the vacuum vessels, but it is not perfect, and often you want to heat up the vessel on purpose to remove water (200 C if using metal seals... With sometimes large gradients to parts that don't have metal seals). A va

I've frequently used large hammers on vacuum vessels that were under vacuum, and they didn't collapse. When you work on plasma experiments, you can end up with mangled electrical components that take a lot of force to remove, but you don't want to break vacuum to do so (there is a big difference between an easy to reach low friction low vacuum, and ultrahigh vacuum that can be ruined by just a thin layer of water from exposing a surface to humidity). The vessels are often just tubes of stainless, and they c

So, so many things wrong with this. First, you rupture the vacuum, you don't kill people. The train coasts to a stop, just like any other object traveling at 500 mph in the air (like, say, a passenger jet, except you don't have to worry about crashing into the ground because you're on the ground). The system is really just a high-speed train that operates in a vacuum for increased efficiency. Secondly, vacuum chambers tend to not be all that delicate. In fact, they tend to be made of incredibly tough materi

You have a shockwave traveling down the tube at several hundred miles an hour until it encounters an obstacle; i.e., the train

There is no shockwave, as a shockwave is some discontinuity that requires a nonlinear steepening effect to propagate (e.g. heating from extremely high intensity compression... not decompression). As there is a distribution of different speed atoms and molecules in a gas, they tend to spread out and form a gradient that grows less steep with propagation.

1atm of pressure differential can be surmounted by the strength of modern building materials. There are many many things that can and likely will go wrong, but to say it's impossible is pretty insulting to all the talented engineers who've put people on the moon, on the bottom of challenger deep, flown stuff to mars, made modern microchips, etc. We could build a hyperloop if we set out to.

I helped design submarines. Big, long metal tubes which can withstand well over 50 atmospheres of external pressure. Designing a tube to withstand a single atmosphere is trivial.

And you don't design these things to be uniform in strength so if it fails, the entire cross-section buckles killing everyone inside. You deliberately design them with weaker sections. That way if there's ever a problem, a weaker section fails first and (for a submarine) gives the crew advance warning the hull is about to fail while allowing them time to recover, or (for an airplane or hyperloop) equalizes the pressure [wikipedia.org] before the entire structure can fail.

I think Hyperloop is a boondoggle in California. But I could actually see it working for South Korea. They have an extremely high population density (lots of potential customers), the maximum travel distance in the country is annoyingly too short for airliner but too long for regular passenger trains, and the geography is incredibly stable (no earthquakes).

Hyperloop is a 'pipe' dream which will mostly serve the rich and only a very few with specific travel requirements. SkyTran would serve an entire City or Country with more then just personal public transportation. Run whatever cables/wires you want down the tracks and get fiber, gas, power and more. Every loading station could be a Wifi/Cellular node blanketing the area with open access.
There is so much potential in a SkyTran system that it

I find that a bit confusing myself. It seems like a perfect plan because it permits preservation of the auto companies — they just go to building monorail pods instead of cars, no big deal. They're the ones who have the manufacturing capacity lying around to do something like that. And it would also be highly compatible with TBC, but then, so is basically any form of transportation given the scale of it.